Chapter One
In the outer edges of the Milky Way is a planet. A fairly non-descript planet with many life forms on it exists. In the middle of what the inhabitants call North America, there is a busy airport, filled with people about to travel to other parts of the planet. In a fairly non-descript gate, a middle-aged man sits busily typing into his laptop computer, reviewing charts and budgets. The man is dressed in business casual clothes, a nebulous term that basically allows men to no longer wear these odd strangulation devices around their neck. Seated next to him is a young man, fresh out of college in a starched suit. The two men struck up a conversation. The young man was going on his first job interview as a consultant. The older man, a seasoned consultant was asked for advice.
The older man shared his wisdom with the younger man. “So you want to be a consultant”, the older man asked. “Well, it is a rewarding job where you do no actual work and tell everyone else how to do their job”. He started talking about all of his tricks of the trade, to the eager young man.
The first thing you need to know about consulting is sound important and to learn the all important language of “consultese”. You need to be able to speak to people about leveraging their synergies and shifting their paradigm. Consultese is very easy to learn and can be learned by buying any business self-help book on the market. The main thing you need to know about consultese is not what the words mean but how you say them. You need to sound like you know what you are talking about.
The second thing you need to know is that you need to have a lot of letters on your business card to sound important. PMP, CPP, CPA, FACS, MCSE are just some of the letters that make you sound important. The three most important ones though are MBA. What is an MBA? The MBA shows you value yourself so much you went and spent $25,000 on your education. Truth is there are only a handful of true MBA’s. They each wrote books to other people that also now call themselves MBA, who write books to others and so on and so on. The MBA means you are using the same knowledge by the all –knowing all-powerful king of MBA’s.
The third thing you need to know as a consultant is the most important job function is knowledge transfer. It’s your job to pass on to your client all of the accumulated knowledge of MBA’s that you have as it relates to them. You don’t want to pass it all on though. You want to hold back a little of it so that the client will have to extend you out further to gain further information. Why would you want to keep a poor, highly-paid consultant out of work by sharing all of your knowledge?
Consultants fly to exotic cities for work. Some of them are Chicago, London, Paris, New York, Cincinnati, Atlanta and Zanesville. What? You’ve never heard of Zanesville? Zanesville is the home of the famous Y-bridge and the best Jack Daniels burger on the planet. Consultants also earn frequent flyer miles, an underground economy. You get many cheap vacations out of frequent flyer miles and get to stay at fancy hotels. Some of them have TV’s in the bathrooms, special lounges for frequent guests and bedbugs. Now, don’t be too grossed out about the bedbugs – they are only in bedspreads.
Consultant life means spending a lot of time in restaurants. One of the problems with restaurants is that you need a new wardrobe for your expanding waistline. The average consultant gains 15 pounds their first year of consulting until they learn to skip the pizza and beer and focus on chicken and wine or whiskey. Typically the wine or whiskey is the dinner. The alcohol makes the pain go away from dealing with clients. Clients are those strange animals that think they can control you. They require these things called “deliverables” and everyone keeps talking about one. What is a deliverable? Well that depends on the project. It can be a spreadsheet, a project plan, a charter, a test plan – it totally depends. You just have to remember it always looks more important when you keep adding pages. That reminds me of a deliverable of an estimate of what needed to be done for a specific project. The estimate was about five pages. When completed, the deliverable had 10 pages of how wonderful the relationship was between the client and the consulting company, my five pages of estimate, 20 pages of testimonials, 10 pages of resumes and 10 pages of marketing fluff. It is rumored that 25% of the rain forest was used for all of the copies of that deliverable. It is then stamped as completed by the client, in triplicate to keep auditors happy.
The younger man asked the older man, “You have a lot of experience. Do you have any travel war stories?” Well, that is another story for another day. I left him with a small piece of advice – never forget a towel or a bowling ball. More to come…
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Jeff Hill PMP, MBA, CNC, PRA, JMB, ADP, PAA, etc. wrote this and I was laughing so hard I pressed "publish" instead of "delete". I hope there is more to come and that he doesn't drink too many Intergalactic Gargle Blasters before the next one!
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